sed

From Seo Wiki - Search Engine Optimization and Programming Languages

sed (stream editor) is a Unix utility that (a) parses text files and (b) implements a programming language which can apply textual transformations to such files. It reads input files line by line (sequentially), applying the operation which has been specified via the command line (or a sed script), and then outputs the line. It was developed from 1973 to 1974 as a Unix utility by Lee E. McMahon of Bell Labs,[1] and is available today for most operating systems.[2]

Contents

History

sed is one of the very early Unix commands built for command line processing of data files. It evolved as the natural successor to the popular grep command.[3] Cousin to the later AWK, sed allowed powerful and interesting data processing to be done by shell scripts.

sed and AWK are often cited as the progenitors and inspiration for Perl. The s / / / syntax shown below is part of Perl's syntax and originated with ed, the precursor to sed.

sed's language does not have variables and has only primitive GOTO and branching functionality; nevertheless, the language is Turing-complete.[3][4]

GNU sed added several new features. The most well-known is in-place editing of files (i.e., replace the original file with the result of applying the sed program), which was later included in BSD sed too. This feature is nowadays used instead of ed scripts: for example,

sed -i 's/abc/def/' file

can be used instead of

ed file
1,$ s/abc/def/
w
q

Super-sed is an extended version of sed that includes regular expressions compatible with Perl.

Another variant of sed is minised, originally reverse-engineered from the 4.1BSD sed by Eric S. Raymond and currently maintained by René Rebe. minised was used by the GNU project until the GNU project wrote a new version of sed based on the new GNU regular expression library. The current minised contains some extensions to BSD sed but is not as feature-rich as GNU sed. Its advantage is that it is very fast and uses little memory.[citation needed] It is used on embedded systems and is the version of sed provided with Minix.[citation needed]

Usage

The following example shows a typical use of sed, where the -e option indicates that the sed expression follows:

sed -e 's/oldstuff/newstuff/g' inputFileName > outputFileName

In many versions, the -e is not required to precede the expression. The s stands for substitute. The g stands for global, which means that all matching occurrences in the line would be replaced. The regular expression (i.e. pattern) to be searched is placed after the first delimiting symbol (slash here) and the replacement follows the second symbol. Slash is the conventional symbol. Any other could be used to make syntax more readable if it does not occur in the pattern or replacement (see below).

The asterisk (*) matches zero or more occurrences of the previous character.

Complex sed constructs are possible, allowing it to serve as a simple, but highly specialised, programming language. Flow of control, for example, can be managed by the use of a label (a colon followed by a string) and the branch instruction b. An instruction b followed by a valid label name will move processing to the block following that label. If the label does not exist then the branch will end the script.

Samples

To delete a line containing a specific word from the file use:

sed '/yourword/d' yourfile

To delete only the word use:

sed 's/yourword//g' yourfile

To delete two words for a file simultaneously use:

sed -e 's/firstword//g' -e 's/secondword//g' yourfile

or

sed 's/firstword//g;s/secondword//g' yourfile

In the next example, sed, which usually only works on one line, removes newlines from sentences where the second sentence starts with one space.
Consider the following text:

This is my cat
my cat's name is betty
This is my dog
my dog's name is frank

The sed script below will turn it into:

This is my cat my cat's name is betty
This is my dog my dog's name is frank